Teams of undergraduate students competed against each other this weekend to develop innovations in sustainability at the 2024 Green Hackathon hosted by the Maseeh Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering. 

This year’s winning team developed a program based on the multiplayer board game Catan. Computer science senior Kaylan Tchamdjou, environmental engineering sophomore Luis Perez and environmental engineering freshman Stella Thomas worked to modify the game, giving it an environmental twist to increase carbon footprint awareness. 

“We wanted the players to think about the constraints of economic goals in relation to sustainability, and to also consider the economic and material cost of transitioning to sustainable options,” Thomas said. 

Berkin Dortdivanlioglu, an assistant professor in the department and judging panel member,  said the winning team stood out because the topic was relevant to the current engineering field and effective at generating interest in sustainability. 

Civil engineering assistant professor Krishna Kumar facilitated the three-day event. Competitors had from Friday evening to Sunday afternoon to develop a sustainability project or solution using Python programming, data analytics and AI-Machine learning before presenting their work to a panel of judges. 

Kumar, who led the hackathon for the second year in a row, said the competition aims to  encourage students to learn AI and coding skills. Kumar said the hackathon also promotes creativity by allowing students to pursue more ambitious and adventurous projects outside of the classroom and without fear of penalties. 

Chemical engineering freshman Arturo Pedraza Flores said he and his teammate, Sophia Pirruccello, also a chemical engineering freshman, joined the competition hoping to learn skills they could apply to their undergraduate research job. 

“We are designing a pump for a facility,” Pedraza Flores said. “We thought it’d be a good idea to first know how to code a working pump in Python to serve as a model for our actual pump at the laboratory.”